In which we learn the truth about the benevolent treatment of the Imperial American Aggressors at Hoa Lo Prison, Hanoi. They weren’t given champagne, but that’s only because they had bombed all the vineyards.

Fforde goes further into narrative deconstruction than he did with The Eyre Affair, using books themselves as a device for exploring new worlds and new locations. Famous characters from every genre and period fly past in a literary whirlwind as he once again demonstrates his passion for the written word. The repeated reliance on coincidence […]

Like Pratchett if he had an obsession with Victorian literature, Jasper Fforde weaves a funny and inventive narrative in an alternative-reality England. With endless wit and a pun on every page, he manages to breathe new life into old classics, wrapping them in pastiche and satire while still showing his obvious love for all things […]

Gladwell has the knack of taking a potentially dry topic and creating a strong narrative around it. Here, his contention that luck plays a significant part in extraordinary success is logical and well-researched, and full of interesting anecdotes to support his case. He might not understand Twitter, but here he is on fine form.

There’s no denying the richness of the research and history here, though as is typically the case with Dan Brown it is used to dress up a routine thriller, this time with an unusually anti-climactic finale. The final reveal manages to be both confused and trite, with plenty of mixed messages and an ending that […]

As a straightforward thriller, albeit with an interesting McGuffin, this could easily be a pretty run of the mill story. However, Gibson’s language drips with distinctive grace-notes, which taken together weave a rich tapestry of the near-future, without succumbing to the need to invent hundreds of new words to sound futuristic. A novel you can […]

In which we make our way from Thaton to Chiang Rai with 12 foreigners and lots of baggage in a boat designed for 10 locals and some fruit, along a river shallow enough that you could do a reasonable impression of Jesus. Cue grated nerves.

I don’t know what Australia has done to piss off Mother Nature recently, but the worst floods in Queensland in 40 years, more flooding in New South Wales and forest fires in Western Australia are being followed by Cyclone Yasi, a mega storm on the scale that you might expect from Roland Emmerich. To get […]

Three chapters in and we’re already following three separate narratives in this complex, layered story. Atwood excels at giving each thread a unique voice and the story unfolds into a neat mystery that is resolved successfully.

ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick are fantastic tools for manipulating images. Here, I outline the montage sub-command and use it to tile two photos of differing dimensions, so that they can be easily aligned in a column format with other images.

One of the most lyrically beautiful books I’ve read in a long time. Every character, moment and emotion is exquisitely portrayed and replete with descriptive grace-notes that immerse the reader in the period and bring warmth and character to what is a relatively uncomplicated story.

Obtuse, deliberately so, but enthralling. Sentences that demand to be read three times and a thousand oblique references that I missed most of, it comes perilously close to being unreadable, but has a sense of humour that is irrepressible.

On my recent joyful rediscovery of reading, a simple and inestimable pleasure that I let alone for too long, and a new bare-bones WordPress plugin I cobbled together tonight to list recently read books.

A simple matrix module written in Erlang, using lists rather than tuples as its main implementation detail, which provides a number of standard matrix operations without the excessive copying and overhead that existing modules exhibit.

Open source projects have immeasurably changed the world and my life for the better. With no formal employment for the bulk of 2011, I pledge to give time and effort to people that need help, and projects that inspire me.